An Interview with Woodrow Borah

Abstract

HIS interview was conducted by representatives of two generations of students who worked with Woodrow Borah, one in the 196os and one in the 198os. To work with Borah was to be constantly involved in an implicitly intellectual duel wherein students sought to avoid Borah's thrusts with parries and thrusts of their own. Elegance of statement and repartee highlighted Borah's approach. Many history graduate students at Berkeley shied from these gruelling duels, and his seminar students often came from outside the Department of History. While undergraduate students remarked on his reputation as a severe grader, large numbers nevertheless filled his classes to enjoy his trenchant lectures. Woodrow Borah trained in interdisciplinary studies during the 1930s, and belongs to that generation of scholars whose work in the post-World War II decades transformed the study of Latin American Taught by such prominent scholars as Carl 0. Sauer and Lesley Byrd Simpson, he had made their approaches into a bridge for generations emerging from Berkeley in the 196os and 1970s. Within the general tradition of historical inquiry, Borah is an innovator in the use of source material and methodology. He pioneered, with Sherburne F. Cook, the use of time-series statistical documentation and methods of treating it. That he would initiate a revolution in methodology and spark much of the controversy that has occurred within Latin American during the last thirty years, surprises him. He sees his own work conservatively, stressing as he does the fundamental continuity of scholarship as well as the fundamental continuity of Mexican history.